Against Afropolitanism: Race and the Black migrant body in contemporary African poetry

Abstract

A growing body of Afropolitan literary and theoretical writing privileges urban migratory crossings that highlight the fluidity of borders, bodies, and identities in contemporary times. Focusing on cosmopolitan ethics and cultural hybridity, these writings contemplate Africa and Africans from the points of view of the world and of their multitudinous racial embeddedness. Yet, while Afropolitanism may usefully complicate the place of Africa(ns) in the world today, it also consistently ignores the precarity of African migrants on whose bodies globalization stages its racist and ultranationalist agenda. Drawing on Gbenga Adeoba’s Exodus, Safia Elhillo’s The January Children, Amatoritsero Ede’s Globetrotter and Hitler’s Children, and Niyi Osundare’s City Without People: Katrina Poems, this article turns to the poetic representations of these migrants’ experiences and their location within a broader history of the abjection of black bodies. Precisely, the article presents a race-centred critique of Afropolitanism to argue that its central focus on multiculturalism, hybridity, and global flows overlaps with the fantastical, mythical discourses of postraciality, colour blindness, and neoliberal individualism.